Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) finds wide use in a variety of industries due to advantages such as rapid to deploy, ease of use, and high transmission rate. However, security setup for Wi-Fi networks is so complex that many users of the wireless networks do not configure any security parameter at all. Consequently, the networks are prone to attacks. To ensure secure, convenient use of wireless networks, the Wi-Fi Alliance releases a Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) standard, also referred to as Wi-Fi Simple Configuration (WSC), to perform security configuration for an accessing wireless terminal, so that a user with little acknowledge of wireless setup and security can still set up a secure wireless local area network (WLAN) easily and conveniently, and add a device to the network conveniently and securely.
An entity referred to as a registrar is defined in the WPS standard to complete configuration for a wireless terminal. A registrar may be built in a wireless access device, and may also be an external registrar independent of a wireless access device, where an external registrar may be referred to as a configuration device. In a case in which an external configuration device is used, in a wireless terminal configuration process in the prior art, a wireless access device needs to forward a corresponding request from a wireless terminal to the configuration device, and forward a corresponding response from the configuration device to the wireless terminal. Consequently, the three all need to be in a working state in the configuration process. When the wireless access device is in an area in which normal communication with the wireless terminal is not available or the wireless access device is in an offline state, configuration for the wireless terminal cannot be completed, resulting in a lack of flexibility in the wireless terminal configuration process.